Using After Effects projects natively in Premiere Pro

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Once your historical image animations are complete in Adobe After Effects, you do not have to render out intermediate files for use in Adobe Premiere Pro. You can actually use After Effects compositions in Premiere. In this movie, author Richard Harrington demonstrates how to import and use After Effects compositions in Premiere Pro.

- Now, if you don't want to renderand create new intermediate files,you can actually use an After Effects compositiondirectly inside of Premiere Pro as a piece of footage.Let me show you how.What you'll need to do is move the itemsfrom After Effects to Premiere Pro.There's a couple ways of doing this.First up, you can select a Compand choose Edit Copy right in the Project Panel.Then if you switch to Premiere Proand make a new project or open one from beforelike the documentary project we created,you'll see that you can pastethat right into the Project Panel.

There it is, it brings a folder over with the mediabut gives you the actual Comp.That can be dropped into a sequenceand you'll see that it should play.Now in this case it's not doing the blending mode correctly.You'll see that it tried to bring this as Layered Files overso it brought the actual sequence.And it took the two different piecesand brought those back into Premiere.

But all of the things like Key Frames did come across.So, you can deal with the different Key Framesand have that movement if you wanted to.In this case, the Vignette simply didn't make the jump.Alright, let's delete that away and do this another way.I can also choose File, Adobe Dynamic Link,Import, After Effects Composition.This allows me to navigate to that project.Let's go to the downloads folderand I'll go to my folder there with the exercise filesand select the After Effects project.

Now, if I select one of the compositions,I can target it and click OK.And it comes in as a piece of footage.You'll notice that, that has everything in tactand it may not play in real time the first time throughbut on my system it didn't actually drop any Frame.So it treated it like a piece of rendered footage.You can do the same thing with the Media Browser.Navigating to any particular folder that you have.

I'll just go to my downloads folderand navigate to my exercise files.And when you select theAfter Effects project it opens it up.You can now see all of the contents of that project.It may take a second as it connect the projectbut it rebuilds all of the linksand will show you each composition.Now, you can step into a folder,grab any Comps that you wantand just right click and choose Import.

And they'll be added to your project.Now, very simply they can go right into the Timeline.And like the ones that we imported one at a timeyou'll see that the clips come in.Now if you get a Drop Frame indicator like I see here,that might tell you that it didn't play backsmoothly the first time but usually on times two or threethe Frames should be cached and you get smooth playback.If you don't see the Drop Frame indicatorjust click the Settings Icon hereand turn on the option to Show Drop Frame Indicator.

That'll make it easier to preview what's happeningand really get a good idea of how thoseAfter Effects Comps are working.This particular relationship of being able to bring in Compswithout having to render first is unique to the relationshipbetween After Effects and Premiere Pro.But it is one advantage.And of course you can always select thingsand press Command or Control E.It'll switch you back into After Effects,open up that item and allow you to make tweaks.

So if I wanted to refine the mask there a little bitand adjust my vignette, here we go.When I click close and I save my workand switch back to Premiere it updates.There's that change.Maybe I decided that I wanted to adjust the color.Edit, Layer, New Adjustment Layer,and I'll apply a black and white effect from the color menu.

There it is and maybe a curve adjustment.There we go.And when I close and save this,I can switch back to Premiere, it updates.So this gives you a lot of flexibility.Not only can you refine the look of the image,but if you needed to, jump back over,lasso all your Key Frames and holding down the option keyor ALT Key I can stretch those out to slow down the shot.

Save my work and switch backand the adjustment is handed off fromAfter Effects to Premiere Pro.Now, you'll find more about working withAfter Effects and Premiere Pro togetherin the online Library, this is just one sample workflow.If you are using another editorial tooljust follow the advice we gave in earlier moviesabout rendering out video files.And those will work just fine.

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Released

6/26/2017

In this course, Rich Harrington explores the world of documentary storytelling, using various techniques in Adobe Photoshop and After Effects to transform damaged photos into brand-new works of art. Throughout the course, Rich covers basic image editing techniques in Photoshop such as toning, cropping, sharpening, and resizing. He also shows how to add movement to photos in After Effects, which can help you create a dramatic story.